What Happens when a Cyberworld Ends? The case of There.com Israel V. Márquez Complutense University of Madrid Av. Seneca, 2 28040 Madrid, Spain [email protected] ABSTRACT This paper is the first in a series presenting findings from a wider ethnography study of players from There.com and what they did when this virtual world closed on March 9th, 2010. Studies of online games and virtual worlds (or cyberworlds, as I prefer to call them) tend to focus in player activities during the time these spaces are open, assuming them as timeless places. But what happens when a cyberworld ends? How do players react to its closure and what they do next? Only a few scholars have investigated such critical events (Pearce 2009; Papargyris and Poulymenakou 2009; Consalvo and Begy 2012) and their findings suggest a determination by players to keep playing together after the closure. Players do not simply disperse and stop playing when a cyberworld ends but they actively work to form groups and relocate their activities elsewhere. I followed the movement of There.com players —or “thereians”, as they refer to themselves— across various cyberworlds, social networks, and forums after There.com closed. They actively worked to keep together gathering in forums, creating Facebook groups, uploading videos on YouTube, and travelling to other cyberworlds such as Second Life, Onverse, Kaneva, Twinity, etc., trying to translate their play identities and activities in these new spaces. In this paper I will focus on the player responses to the There.com closure and what they did after the end of the world. Keywords Cyberworld, Cyberdiaspora, Cyberethnography, Death, Liminality. INTRODUCTION On March 9, 2010, the 3D social cyberworld There.com closed to the public. Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com , announced the closure a week before in a post submitted to the cyberworld’s website. He stated that there just wasn't enough money to keep the world running and that Makena Technologies, the company behind There , was affected by the economical crisis. As Wilson said in this post: “While our membership numbers and the number of people in the world have continued to grow, there has been a marked decrease in revenue, which, in these economic times, is no surprise […] There is a business, and a business that can't support itself doesn't work”. Many people were Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies . © 2013 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. outwardly enraged at the announcement of There.com 's closing, but there really wasn't much that could be done about it. Some players speculated on how to keep the world running, and offered ideas like making members pay per month to keep it all going. But the decision had already been taken and the world finally ended up closing down the announced date. Players cited emotions such as shock, anxiety, anger and sadness to describe their feelings about the closure. They felt like they were losing something, their avatars, their friends, their objects, their houses: a community, an entire world. This world was not “virtual” at all. It was “in many ways as real as the ‘real’ world”, as one informant said to me. The people players met there were very real and their feelings and reactions to the closure were very real too. This is why the term “virtual world” is not a good way to describe these spaces. They are “real” worlds, as real as the physical one (Boellstorff 2008; Pearce 2009; Kozinets 2010). Cyberworld closures are nothing new. 1 Habitat , sometimes referred as the first graphical cyberworld, closed down in 1988. Meridian 59 did it in 2000 and reopened in 2002 due to popular demand from their fans. Uru: Ages Beyond Myst closed down in 2003, six months after they opened (Pearce 2009). Earth and Beyond did it in 2004. And EA-land, formerly known as The Sims Online , closed down in 2008. Although cyberworld closures are something players are experienced more and more, as these examples show, we have little empirical evidence regarding what people do after that. As Pearce (2009: 14) says, “With all the real and imagined success of MMOGs and MMOWs, there is another more somber side to this narrative: what happens when virtual worlds fail?” Consalvo and Begy (2012) observe that most of what we know about MMOG and cyberworld sunset 2 events has come from games journalism rather than scholarly studies. It is not strange thus that most studies of cyberworlds are about the activities and interactions between the inhabitants when the worlds are alive and running. But we do not know much about what happens when a cyberworld closes down. How users react to the closure and what they do next is the focus of this paper. BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGY Virtual Worlds or Cyberworlds? In this paper, I will use the term “cyberworlds” instead of “virtual worlds” and other confusing terms such as MMORGs, MMOWs or metaverses for various reasons. The first one is a wish to avoid the negative connotations that the term “virtual” inevitably carries with it. These connotations go back to the optical sense of “virtual”, which refers to something double, an illusion, something fictive or nonexistent (Ryan 2001). As Malaby (2009: 145) points out, most scholars make use of the term “virtual worlds” because they acknowledge that this expression “currently enjoys precedence, despite the misleading suggestion that ‘virtual’ makes: that there is a clear separation of it from the ‘real’”. This is a clear sign that the term is not good enough to describe the type of experience users have in these spaces, an experience that is “real” and not “virtual” because “The people that we meet online are not virtual. They are real communities populated with real people […] These social groups have a ‘real’ existence for their participants, and thus have consequentional effects on many aspects of behavior” (Kozinets 2010: 15). -- 2 -- The second reason is because the Greek prefix cyber- means skilled in steering or governing and therefore ideas of governance and control are central from the very origin of the term. It is important to keep this meaning in mind because cyberworlds are businesses governed by companies that have total control over almost everything that happens inside. They can change, close and sometimes re-open them as much as they want. Virtual worlds thus are “cyber” rather than “virtual” because the control and the effects and consequences it provokes in our final experience are very “real”, as for example those related with the end of a cyberworld and the way it is announced and executed by its owners. This idea of control is also related to the software that is the basis of the cyberworld and which allows the user to do certain things but not others. Even in the more open, free and co-created worlds like Second Life —which is supposed to be limited only by the imagination of their players, as its slogan clearly says: “Your World, Your Imagination”— there is a hegemonic governance framework and an implicit policy that in practice translates as: “You can do anything you want, unless we decide you can’t.” (Pearce 2009: 34). Thus, the software and the way it is implemented and governed by the owners of the cyberworld dictates what we can do and what we can’t. A third reason why I prefer the term cyberworld is because the term cyberspace had a sense of open space and conquering frontiers (Boym 2001: 349) and, in some sense, this is what I witnessed following the people from There.com and the flux of activity they developed after the closure of this particular cyberworld. These people traversed a vast part of cyberspace gathering in different websites and searching for a new cyberworld similar to There , exploring and conquering digital frontiers around the net. But even the experience of entering a single cyberworld has this sense of space exploration related to the term cyberspace, a sense that terms like “virtual” do not have. Method This paper is the first in a series presenting findings from a wider ethnography study of players from There.com and what they did when this cyberworld closed on March 9th, 2010. Consequently with my use of the term “cyberworlds”, for the reasons stated above, I prefer to use the term “cyberethnography” instead of “virtual ethnography” to describe the ethnography conducted on the Internet. This term goes beyond the negative connotations of the term “virtual” and assumptions like the necessity of face-to-face meetings in order to understand the “authentic” and “real” social experience, assumptions that make difficult a comprehension of Internet as a cultural context in its own right (Hine 2000; Boellstorff 2008). With respect to the prefix “cyber”, the ethnographer, like the users, cannot do whatever he wants within cyberworlds since they are controlled and governed by the companies that own them. Ethnographers have to accept the rules of the software and their underlying values, which will be different in each cyberworld. The whole project can be described as a “multi-sited cyberethnography” (Pearce 2009) since it involves ethnographic explorations in more than one digital place, closely following a process of cyberdiaspora originated and developed within the Internet. Because of the nature of this research, which covers the process of a cyberdiaspora within the Internet, Marcus´s “multi-sited ethnography” can be adapted in order to “examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities” (Marcus 1995: 96) through different digital places, not only cyberworlds but also social networks, forums, blogs, -- 3 -- wikis, video-sharing websites, etc.